


Delilah

by Baylor



Series: Birthright [27]
Category: The Faculty (1998), The X-Files
Genre: Alien Resistance, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Angst, Conspiracy, Gen, Men in Black - Freeform, Really You
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baylor/pseuds/Baylor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Delilah, figuring out where to go from here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Delilah

Delilah didn’t have time to give what had happened in Herrington much thought while she was at boarding school. After all, she had less than a year to claw her way to the top of the social order at a new school. And, by God, she was going to.

_____ 

She couldn’t stand the thought of more than a week in Herrington, so the next summer, she convinced her mother that they should go sightseeing in Europe during the three weeks that she wasn’t a camp counselor or at the Young Leaders Conference.

“You know me, Mom,” she wheedled. “Gotta stay busy.”

 _Gotta stay busy, gotta push forward, gotta keep ahead_ , something inside her chanted unceasingly. _Don’t stop, don’t breathe, don’t think, don’t let it catch up with you_.

_____ 

At Columbia, Delilah started to think for the first time that something was wrong with her, that ambition might actually be franticness, that all of this pushing and climbing might not have very much to do with wanting to be the best.

This thought made her angry, and then she stayed angry, and people in her path learned to steer clear of her teeth and perfectly manicured nails. 

Some days, Delilah wanted to sink those teeth and nails into herself, to claw her way out of her own skin, because she thought then she might actually feel better.

She had a vague memory of her skin crawling, of things threatening to erupt out of her and burrow their poisonous way into other people. 

The feeling hadn’t ever really left her.

_____ 

In November, an FBI agent named John Doggett came to see Delilah. This was after she’d already told the first batch of agents she neither knew or cared where Zeke Tyler had absconded to with Casey Connor.

Doggett reminded her of Coach Willis, only in a suit, until he opened his mouth and the Bronx accent came out. 

“I don’t know where they are,” Delilah said when Doggett approached her outside her dormitory. “And I’m the last person they’d come to for help. Sorry to tell you you’ve wasted your time.” She started walking, quickly. Delilah always walked quickly.

Doggett kept up with her easily. “Yeah, that’s what you said to the first guys,” he answered. “I was wondering something else.”

“What?” Delilah said impatiently, not bothering to look at him. 

“I wondered if Zeke Tyler might come to you for another reason. Like revenge,” he said.

Delilah laughed dryly. “Worried for my safety, Agent?” she asked. “I doubt it. Zeke’s got other problems right now.”

“Maybe he doesn’t,” Doggett said. “Maybe he took care of those problems already.”

Delilah stopped abruptly and gave Doggett a withering look. “What, you think Zeke killed Casey?” she asked. “Is that what you’re getting at?”

Doggett shrugged. “He’s capable, isn’t he?”

Delilah snorted. Sure, Zeke was capable of killing. In fact, she’d seen him do it. That had nothing to do with the present conversation.

“Zeke would never hurt Casey,” she said. “Ever. You want to help Casey? Why don’t you find out why Zeke took him in the first place.”

When she walked away, Doggett didn’t follow.

_____ 

She had bad dreams that year, and lack of sleep made her irritable. 

“Maybe you should take a break, sweetheart,” her mother told her at the end of her freshman year, and there was something in her alcohol-heavy eyes that was almost worry. “Do something relaxing this summer.”

So Delilah went to Europe by herself, and she wandered through all the great sites of the Old World and pondered the fall of civilizations.

She also drank, heavily, and made sure she didn’t have to sleep alone.

In the south of France, she sunk her teeth one night into the shoulder of a young man named Pierre, drawing blood. Later, he ran his fingers over the bite.

“Why has happened to you, Delilah, that you wish to hurt the world?” he asked quietly. “Who has hurt you so horribly?”

“Nothing has happened to me,” Delilah said, and deliberately shifted so the sheet slipped off her body. 

Pierre, undistracted, reached out with the hand that had been on his wound and touched her cheek. “You can tell me,” he said. 

Delilah’s heart thudded in her chest and her mouth was dry. “I can’t tell anyone,” she whispered, and in the morning she got on a train to Italy, alone.

While she toured the ruins of ancient Rome, she would find herself suddenly lightheaded, her heart pounding in her chest, and would have to sit and put her head between her knees. People who are going to be People don’t have panic attacks, she would tell herself firmly, and that usually snapped her out of it. 

Delilah hated weakness. It really pissed her off.

She returned to Columbia in a mood, and people scrambled to get out of her path.

_____ 

Near the end of the semester, her foreign policy professor told her of a student page position at the U.N. that would be open after the holidays. She was interviewed by three men in somber suits and impeccably polished shoes.

“We’ve been watching your progress with great interest, Miss Profitt,” the one who spoke said. “You’ve made excellent decisions, ever since Herrington.”

“Have I?” Delilah said coolly. “Thank you,” and she abruptly, clearly, knew who she was talking to. She thought about Zeke going to prison and Casey being locked away, how everything had tied up so nice and neat, at least until Zeke had pulled his little kidnapping act

“We think you have a bright future,” the one who spoke said. “We’d like to help you make it even brighter.”

Suddenly, Delilah knew whom she had been angry with all this time, and it wasn’t herself, after all. 

So, naturally, she accepted their offer.

_____ 

The U.N. job was boring, and the men in suits seldom asked her to do anything other than deliver messages to other men in suits. Still, she got to wear smart little suits herself, and mingle with Important People.

She also got to listen. Delilah became very good at hearing things. She heard lots of names. Zeke’s, sometimes. Someone named Fox Mulder, often. Agent Doggett’s, with increasing frequency. And one that she was particularly interested in, a name that was hissed with distaste and associated with words like _traitor_ and _resistance_. Alex Krycek. 

_____ 

It was difficult to be patient. She sat in meetings sometimes and took notes while the men in dark suits and shiny shoes talked and envisioned rolling a bomb across the floor, the brilliance of the flash, the beauty of the flames, the satisfaction of it being over.

She wasn’t stupid, though. No one had ever presumed that about Delilah Profitt. For starters, she had no idea how to make or purchase bombs, or how to smuggle them into the type of secure boardrooms that were now her second home. And she knew that for every man she was aware of, there were three more she’d never laid eyes on. It was like surfing the Internet, with one link leading to another to another to another, and still you were not to the heart of the matter.

 _I should have gone to drama school_ , Delilah thought sometimes, and then kept right on following orders with a smile.

_____ 

Maybe she’d made a mistake, she started to think as the next year’s holidays drew near. How would they ever know what she really wanted? How would they ever know to contact her? It wasn’t like she could pass someone a note in class. 

_How do we even know who’s alien and who’s not?_ someone whispered in her head, and that had been Stan, she thought, but it was murky, everything was murky after the science lab, and her mind kept trying to reorganize it into something it wasn’t, something that would end with her believing that the story she had told the police was actually what had happened. 

The suited men were all too human. Delilah just didn’t know if there were some of them who might be something more than suited men. There was no way to tell who else sitting in those boardrooms was daydreaming about explosive and guns and making people pay.

_____ 

There weren’t many other women, which was why Delilah noticed the blonde woman in the expensive suit seated along the side, near the front of the room. The three suits were at the far end, behind the long table, peering down at her.

Delilah stood at the end of the table and coolly answered their questions. This happened, every so often, questions about Herrington or Marybeth or Zeke and Casey. Delilah always wondered what prompted the questions, but she never asked.

The blonde woman was watching her in a way that almost seemed bored, Delilah noticed from the corner of her eye. Almost. Delilah knew that look. She used it all the time. The blonde woman had an unusual interest in Delilah. Delilah wondered if she was imagining blowing her up. 

Or maybe the blonde woman wasn’t what she seemed. 

Her heart thudded in her chest and Delilah snapped at it, _Not now. I need to think._ Her mouth answered the questions automatically while her mind scrambled around, knocking things over, looking for a signal, searching for directions.

“Do you think that Mr. Tyler would ever harm Mr. Connor?” one of the suited men asked, and it was a new question from the suits, one they’d never posed before. Delilah remembered John Doggett and wondered if he’d ever bothered to find out why Zeke had really taken Casey.

“Yes,” she heard herself answer. “I believe he would. He’s certainly capable.”

The blonde woman blinked and continued to look bored. Delilah answered the rest of their questions, and when they dismissed her, she went back to her studio apartment, curled up on the bed and laughed hysterically until she cried.

_____ 

No one came to kill her, or take her away, that night or the next night or any of the nights after that, so Delilah guessed no one had caught her in the lie. She knew the kind of things that happened to people who lied to the suits. She knew what happened to traitors. 

But no one else came for her either, to talk about bombs and plans and revenge, so Delilah guessed that the blonde woman had really just been bored after all.

Delilah was bleakly disappointed. She would have made such a good resistance member.

_____ 

Bombs might look good in movies, she thought the next month, but they really weren’t practical for your everyday disenfranchised resistance member. Guns were much more practical. 

She started stopping in weapons stores every so often, just to see what was out there.

Sometimes it occurred to Delilah that she might be a little bit mad, but at least it was a good, focused crazy. She’d hate to end up a second-rate psycho, when she’d been so good at everything else she’d ever tried.

_____ 

She managed to hold off until spring break, because she wanted to go home one more time, to kiss her mother on her vodka-saturated cheek and drive by Herrington High. She couldn’t last much longer, though, Delilah knew, because every time she sat in a room with the people who had so casually ruined so many lives – so many more than Delilah had first imagined – she knew she couldn’t continue to breathe that poisoned air for much longer without going stark-raving mad. And if she actually, really went mad, she might screw it all up.

She boarded at La Guardia and stored her bag in the overhead compartment. It would be good to see Herrington again, she mused. Maybe she would even go see Stan, not that he’d be happy to see her. Still, it was always good to go home.

Her bag secure, she looked at her seat. A man in a leather jacket was in the window seat next to it, his left arm on the armrest. It was shiny and plastic.

“Hello, Delilah,” he said, and gave her a sharp, cunning smile that did not reach his eyes.

Delilah felt her mouth curve upward, and knew that her own smile looked just like his. Something inside her sparked to life, and she was fiercely, deliriously joyous. 

“It’s about damn time,” she said.


End file.
